Measurement of the dissociation energies of gas phase neutral dimers by a photoionization technique

A knowledge of the dissociation energies of weak polyatomic heterodimers in the gas phase provides extremely important information for the study of long range intermolecular forces, which study is crucial if chemical reactivity is to be understood in detail. Unfortunately, very few such dissociation energies are known because the measurements have been very difficult. To help alleviate this problem a photoionization technique has been developed for making these measurements that is proving to be fast, unambiguous, sensitive, accurate, and reasonably general.